


the goddamn loveliest melody

by sodiumflare



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Cemeteries, Gen, Sensory Overload, but seriously don't fuck with nuns, don't fuck with nuns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 10:43:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4134489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sodiumflare/pseuds/sodiumflare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're happy, at first, because you've stopped screaming, but then they figure out that just because everyone else is sleeping through the night now doesn't mean that you are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the goddamn loveliest melody

After a week, they give you your own room. It's a big room. It belonged to Sister Katherine, and then she died, and they wanted you to stop screaming, so they moved you to the quietest part of the building and prayed a lot.

You don't pray, now: you screamed all your prayers out. No number of pater nosters can make everything just - _stop_.

It's better than the dormitory was (too many bodies, too many heartbeats, too much wheezing from the asthmatic boy and too much smell from girl who shouldn't drink milk). It's better than the closet they'd moved you to out of desperation not long after (smelled like mold, like bleach and lysol and just slightly like sex). It's a big room. The window seals better than the one in the dormitory: the draft doesn't feel like a wind on your face. Somewhat reassuringly, it doesn't smell like sex. It does smell like death. You haven't decided if that's a step up.

They're happy, at first, because you've stopped screaming, but then they figure out that just because everyone else is sleeping through the night now doesn't mean that you are.

Sometimes, in the quietest, darkest time before the dawn (the coldest part of the night, and you can feel it on your skin no matter the sheets or your pajamas), you can still hear the asthmatic boy wheezing quietly.

He's two floors away.

(He has a name, and probably you were told it, but separating what's important from what's not is like trying to hold wet sand in your hands. Some of it just slips through no matter what you do.)

They give you something sweet to drink, sometimes, and you sleep after, but they can't give it to you every night, or even every second night. Father Joseph, you know, thinks you shouldn't be given it at all, but he's a little bit afraid of the sisters, you think, and so you get to sleep, sometimes. It doesn't feel like sleep used to, and your dreams have a sickly cast. You used to dream of the sky, sometimes, and now it doesn't look quite right.

You're so tired.

Exhaustion or not, they still make you leave your room sometimes ("He'll tire himself out, perhaps," Sister Kevin said desperately, in a whisper, at the foot of the stairs; she forgot to take her heart medicine last night. She's been forgetting more often. You hope she'll remember again. You don't want to move to her room, either.)

So they herd you, gently, from Sister Katherine's room and down the stairs, and through the halls, and out into the school yard. The other students are in classes, at least. You can hear them, inside, but it's better than hearing them outside. (When they get too close, it sometimes sounds like they're inside your head. You hadn't known terror until you could hear Becca Martinelli's taunts from inside your skull.)

They leave you by yourself - perhaps out of kindness, perhaps out of exhaustion (they, too, are tired, of you and for you) - suddenly, you are alone.

You know every inch of this yard. 

It's autumn. September. The leaves are beginning to rattle in the wind, which is out of the west: it smells of the sea, which is more redolent of fish and oil and decay than most people notice. It still smells better than Sister Katherine's room. Or than the orphanage, after Boiled Cabbage Tuesdays. (Someday, you swear, are going to leave this place, live somewhere where there is nobody else, and you will never, ever eat cabbage again.)

(Later, much later, you will refuse to even go into Dulaney Hall at Columbia on St. Patrick's Day, and Foggy will rib you for it, endlessly, until he is distracted by something else, and you will never tell him why. Until, even later, you do.)

You don't know the streets around the orphanage as well, but you can infer. You can't not. You can hear the traffic, the wind, the clatter of feet on pavement. You can also hear a zone of relative quiet, a few blocks east. If your internal map is a game of Battleship, it's an area with no hits.

It sounds like heaven, and you are still by yourself, and so you go.

It's near a church - not the one attached to the orphanage, a Presbyterian one. It's a tiny, brave outpost in an otherwise Catholic neighborhood. You don't know anything about Presbyterians except that Marty Callen gave you a black eye once, a few years back, and it had something to do with you being Catholic, and him being something else. Your father didn't really explain it: just gave you a bag of frozen vegetables for your eye and fried fish that night for dinner, just to strike back in the cosmic balance. Or something. Mostly it was an excuse to fry something, you think. The memory of the smell of hot grease reminds you of your father, and something in your chest warms, just a bit.

So you turn toward the church, because you can, and because it is quiet.

There's a field next to it - 

No, not a field. There are things in it. No, there are things _below it._

t's a graveyard, you realize. Not in use anymore, you guess: there's a faint smell of decay, but not foul: it smells more like a sack oof potatoes than the trash heap behind the kitchens. It's just slightly warm, in fairly regular instances.

It's so quiet. You make your way to the center, and sit on one of the patches of warmth. 

When you sit in chairs in the orphanage, you can feel them rattle when trucks drive down the street. You can hear the table jump when Sister Elizabeth sneezes. The headstone is smooth, and unyeilding, and moves not at all when you settle against it. You sort the sounds: standard street birds (pigeons, gulls, some geese a few blocks away); the sound of traffic (rush hour beginning to roil) and people walking, talking, doing what people do. But they are so far away. 

There is sun on your face. It is faint: it's getting late. Someone will come to the play yard to find you soon, if they haven't already. But they are not here. And you are. You feel your breath; feel something in your chest expand. You breathe. 

They find you a few hours later, after frantic search and shouting that, they tell you later, they are astounded you slept through; curled like a cat against a granite headstone, sleeping peacefully for the first time in weeks, hands tucked against your chest, chilled and stiff and serene. There is a whispered, furious debate at the graveyard fence about the neighborhood politics of Catholic nuns entering Presbyterian space, and then another, more emphatic one about what to do with you. 

In the end, Sister Kevin wins out, to the ire of Father Joseph. The nuns and the Father remain at the fence, while the youngest and spriest among them (Sister Teresa, 46 but fond of calisthenics) hurries back to the orphanage and retrieves a blanket (flannel, well worn, doubled over on itself). 

You wake, briefly, when kind hands tuck the blanket around you. Then you fall back asleep, and your dreams are of a sky full of clouds heavy with snow, thick like a duvet and full of promise. 

Father Joseph (furious, but overruled, and at a loss for any other options) has a meeting with the Presbyterians the next day, and you sleep in the graveyard every night until the frost comes; then, they move you back to Sister Katherine's old room (which now, disturbingly, _does_ smell like sex), and everyone endures for two miserable days. 

On the third day, the bring the man with the stick to you, and everything changes. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Bright Eyes' "Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and to Be Loved)":
> 
> _how grateful I was then to be part of the mystery_  
>  _to love and to be loved_  
>  _let's just hope that is enough._
> 
> Because I wanted to know about the orphanage before Stick showed up. Also, let's explore hypervigilance and the part where it won't let you sleep.


End file.
